Minimally actuated tiltrotor for perching and normal force exertion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a minimally actuated tiltrotor with 5 degrees of freedom, capable of perching and exerting normal forces, featuring a novel hardware design and control system validated through experiments.

Contribution

The work presents a new hardware design and control method for a minimally actuated tiltrotor with enhanced interaction capabilities and no mechanical obstructions, enabling perching and physical interaction.

Findings

Successful position and pitch control demonstrated

Effective perching and cart pushing shown in experiments

Tiltrotor can hover parallel to arbitrary surfaces

Abstract

This study presents a new hardware design and control of a minimally actuated 5 control degrees of freedom (CDoF) quadrotor-based tiltrotor. The proposed tiltrotor possesses several characteristics distinct from those found in existing works, including: 1) minimal number of actuators for 5 CDoF, 2) large margin to generate interaction force during aerial physical interaction (APhI), and 3) no mechanical obstruction in thrust direction rotation. Thanks to these properties, the proposed tiltrotor is suitable for perching-enabled APhI since it can hover parallel to an arbitrarily oriented surface and can freely adjust its thrust direction. To fully control the 5-CDoF of the designed tiltrotor, we construct an asymptotically stabilizing controller with stability analysis. The proposed tiltrotor design and controller are validated in experiments where the first two experiments of $x,y$ position tracking and pitch tracking show controllability of the added CDoF compared to a conventional quadrotor. Finally, the last experiment of perching and cart pushing demonstrates the proposed tiltrotor's applicability to perching-enabled APhI.